Faculty
Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and Julia & Rodrigo, winner of the 2012 Gival Press Novel Award. His latest book, The Rink Girl: Stories, won the 2018 Prize Americana (Hollywood Books). He wrote the script for the award-winning Peace Corps film How Far Are You Willing to Go to Make a Difference? Brazaitis’ writing has been featured on the Diane Rehm Show and the Leonard Lopate Show as well as on public radio in Cleveland, Iowa City, New York City, and Pittsburgh. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University.
https://english.wvu.edu/research/west-virginia-writers-workshop/faculty
Jim Daniels is a native of Detroit, Michigan, poet and writer Jim Daniels lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His books include The Luck of the Fall (Michigan State University Press, 2023), The Human Engine at Dawn, (Wolfson Press, 2022), Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press, 2021), and Rowing Inland (Wayne State University Press, 2017). With M. L. Liebler, he coedited the anthology RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2020).
Daniels has received support from two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His books have won four Michigan Notable Book Awards, the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, the Tillie Olsen Creative Writing Award, the Milton Kessler Award, and three Gold Medals in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, among other honors, and his films have won awards in film festivals around the world. His work has been published in The Best American Poetry and in Pushcart Prize volumes.
He is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship recipient. Her poetry collections include Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 Bronze IPPY Award for Poetry, 2025 NYC Big Book Award, 2025 Feathered Quill Award, 2025 National Federation of Press Women Award, 2024 POTY Author of the Year Award and STORYTRADE Award; Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Legacy Award, the 2023 Best Book Award, and finalist for the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award; and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award.
A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series, Women Speak. Gunter-Seymour holds writing workshops for incarcerated adults and women in recovery, is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and the founder, curator, and host of "Spoken & Heard," a seasonal performance series featuring poets, writers, and musicians from across the country.
She is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded through the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was selected to serve as a 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet and is a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, World Literature Today, American Book Review, Poem-a-Day and Katie Curic's Wake Up Call.
Sarah Morris teaches undergraduate writing courses and is the associate coordinator for the Undergraduate Writing Program at West Virginia University. Her research interests include human science phenomenology, embodiment, writing process, and student-centered teaching.
She is the author Take Me Home, Country Roads, published by the West Virginia University Press in 2025. The book examines the song “Country Roads” as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining “Country Roads” as anthem, text, artifact, and rhetoric, Morris’ book untangles ideas related to place, belonging, identity, and pedagogy. Morris uses the Welsh term hiraeth, which is an existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home, as a governing framework for the work. She explores the song in various contexts, such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, concepts of home and belonging, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” while being about West Virginia, has registered as a global phenomenon.